For billions of years, plants, algae and fungi have woven new life around the Earth, creating oxygen for us to breathe, feeding us, clothing us, healing our bodies and lifting our spirits. A feature of this foundational life support system has been cooperation – life working with life to further life through symbiotic dances of giving, taking and networking. Beautiful and complex relationships have evolved over deep time, of which we are all an interconnected outcome.
Being attuned to this life-support system and sensitive to nature’s complexities and continual adjustments has been key to human evolution. For millennia we lived and thrived by striving to read the signs and maintain balance. But something changed. Industrialisation was a circuit breaker, making our dependence on plant life invisible, disconnecting us from nature’s ebbs, flows, rhythms and displays. Life has been brutally oversimplified, with distressing and dangerous consequences, disconnection and destruction playing out its own dark dance.
The rift is not just ecological, but cultural. We have told ourselves that people are separate to nature, exceptional and of a higher order, with a right to conquer and ride roughshod over the natural world. Perhaps one of the great paradoxes of our time is that the more disconnected we have become from plant life, the more science reveals plants as intelligent participants in interdependent living systems. Mycorrhizal fungi cover unimaginable distances and form essential partnerships in communal exchange with more than two-thirds of all plants. Trees host microbes, insects, birds, bats and other life forms, all working in relationship together. Plants sense the world around them by perceiving light, detecting sound vibrations and responding to touch, while communicating through chemical signals to warn their neighbours of predators.
If we need to be brought back down to earth, this type of understanding can start to challenge human superiority and exceptionalism. As indeed can the NGV exhibition Plant Life: The Nature of Design, which invites us to rediscover how our lives are intimately interconnected with the natural world, how nature sustains us and uplifts us, and how when we think and act in partnership with plant life, new possibilities emerge.
When we pull back the curtain, when the seemingly invisible becomes visible through science and our own observations, when imagination is employed through art, design, storytelling and our own hopes, something changes, something is activated. A primordial sense of acknowledgement and connection emerges, an understanding that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, and that care and reciprocity are central to who we might really be. Go a little deeper and a yearning to reintegrate with more than human life surfaces, a desire to become stewards of the natural world, not destroyers of it, to enable and celebrate life.
This is where the concept of the Symbiocene comes in. It’s a way to think and act symbiotically in partnership with nature, and sets out how to protect and nurture the interconnectedness of all life so that people, plants and all living things thrive in partnership into the future. First proposed by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his book Earth Emotions, the Symbiocene presents a pathway to a new era where humanity’s destructive dominance is replaced by guardianship of the natural world. It is a growing movement globally. For example, Joris Laarman’s non-toxic and biodegradable Ply loop chair – featured in Plant Life – was conceived with the Symbiocene in mind.1Pranjal Maheshwari, ‘Joris Laarman advocates for the Symbiocene at Friedman Benda’, STIRworld, 27 May 2026.
The Symbiocene is a positive vision of the future with practical symbiotic ways to get there, and offers something that often feels lacking: hope. This new era can be fuelled by living carbon – plants, algae and fungi.2See Glenn Albrecht, ‘From the economy to the sumbonomy’, Psychoterratica, 14 July 2026. These organisms in combination with sunlight and photosynthesis are renewable and almost infinite. Together they can power us, feed us and provide materials to make things with. Radical as it may seem, the Symbiocene can be a new era of abundance, with the extraction of dead, finite carbon as coal, oil, gas and petrochemicals confined to another time. A symbiotic revolution awaits – let’s start to imagine it!
Imagine a world in which resources are naturally replenished, working within the cycles of nature and technology helps us promote not exploit biodiversity. Where classrooms are spaces to learn about interconnectedness and how to think and act in partnership with all life. Where improving human health and wellbeing is coupled to the improving health of the natural world. Where our homes, schools and workplaces are rich in plant life and function as air purifiers, habitats for pollinators and places to grow food. Where our clothes are grown from fungi and our homes are built with hemp and algae. A world where environmental crises have met by addressing a crisis of imagination and we are fulfilled by busily building relationships with plant life, finding joy in diversity and rediscovering our true interconnected selves.
We can wonder how far away this future might be. Plant Life: The Nature of Design suggests it has already started.
Andy Marks is Founder and Executive Director of the Symbiocene Institute, a not-for-profit organisation that helps businesses, designers and communities apply symbiosis-based principles to transform how society values the natural world.